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Tuesday, November 29, 2016

...especially in the first three years of life.The NEXT Foundation have made a generous gift to New Zealand funding an initiative called Talking Matters - a campaign to promote the importance of communicating with babies in their first 1,000 days.For years our teachers have been aware of the significant negative impact on children who arrive at our Decile 1 schools having heard 30 million less spoken words than their fortunate peers in suburbs not too far down the road. They spend their life playing catch-up. We work hard to accelerate learning with highly effective teaching strategies and try not to focus on the wistful thought that we are starting 5 years too late!We are delighted to hear that a group are taking action. Watch Talking Matters Director Alison Sutton talk about this exciting initiative to educate parents about the importance of talking to babies and immersing them in conversation, songs and rhymes - as well as reading to them.You can watch a further video where Prof Stuart McNaughton comments on the significance of this initiative.

Thursday, November 24, 2016

Dr Rebecca Jesson from the Woolf Fisher Research Centre attended our recent Manaiakalani combined Boards of Trustees forum and presented current findings and recommendations resulting from the research carried out in our schools.

Her half hour presentation was informative, to the point and made very accessible for the audience - most of whom were not educators.

The graphic on the left illustrates one of the outstanding findings shared by the researchers - that learners who spend three consecutive years in the Manaiakalani programme make more progress than the average kiwi kid.

The video below is a highly recommended watch for people wanting a progress update on the 12 Manaiakalani Schools in 2016.

Another standout quote from the night for this group of parents who may have had questions about their children being in digital learning environments assured them that the face to face conversations teachers have with the young people can be more powerful because of the digital."Manaiakalani is one the most effective interventions across the world for improving face to face conversation".Dr Rebecca Jesson, Nov 2016